Our next module for our summer research project under Prof Nandi is now complete.
We generated pseudo-data for two body decay processes and processed it in another independent code, which looked for resonance in the available set of data. This is a very common method for looking for particles in the humongous heap of data that the LHC produces, though we’re doing it at a much smaller scale, obviously (duh).
Going into the details, what we basically did was take pairs of Kaons, $K^{+}$ and $K^{-}$, from the available data set (generated by a separate code running Monte-Carlo simulations that we wrote in the previous module), and then calculated their invariant masses. The ones that came from the same $\varphi$ meson, would show a strong correlation, in terms of their invariant masses all adding up to the same value, i.e. around 1020 MeV (mass of the $\varphi$ meson). The other pairs would only contribute to a random background. Hence plotting a historam of counts versus invariant mass for all possible Kaon pairs would give us a peak around 1020 MeV. This is what we call the resonance peak.
This is the plot for invariant mass that we obtained: As always, you can check out our code in our Github repo, and leave comments.